not be the hero. However we are going to talk about it a bit differently,

a bit more psychologically but, first, we need to recap why Mario might be bad to

begin with. So here are a few popular examples: Mario has no problem sacrificing his friend

Yoshi into an abyss to save his own life. In the instruction booklet for Super Mario

Bros. it mentions how the Mushroom people were turned into stones, bricks and horse-hair

plants. So it can be concluded that those bricks Mario punches through are actually

the transformed people he is supposed to be saving.

Now, with knowing what we do let’s ask the question, Is Mario Evil? Well, what is evil?

In James Waller’s incredible book Becoming Evil he defines it as “the deliberate harming

of humans by other humans”. In The Lucifer Effect, psychologist Philip Zimbardo says

evil is “intentionally behaving in ways that harm, abuse, demean, dehumanize, or destroy

innocent others.”

So now, Is Mario Evil? I mean, his actions don’t harm other humans. The instruction

manual makes that very clear. Whenever it talks about those who are trying to rescue or protect

it uses the word “people”. The Mushroom People, the daughter of the Mushroom

King - it is humanizing. And we can obviously relate to people. We can put value in people.

But a “tribe of turtles” and the “turtle king”, well, it's easier to not identify

with turtles. Especially when the booklet generalizes them all as “bad guys”. We

are told this by what is ostensibly the authority on the game, I mean, it is was written by

the people who made the game so why would they put us in a compromising situation?

In 1961 psychologist Stanley Milgram began conducting a social psychology experiment.

It involved 3 people: The Experimenter (who acted as the authority figure), the Teacher

(the subject) and the Learner who was secretly part of the experiment as well. In the main

room was the experimenter and the teacher with a control board, and in the other room

was the Learner who was connected by electrodes to the board in the main room. If the Learner

answered one of the Teacher’s questions wrong, the teacher was instructed to give

them a shock and increase it by 15 volts for every incorrect response. But there were never

any shocks delivered, the Teacher just thought there were and, since the teacher and learner

were in two separate rooms, they couldn't see each other. A pre-recorded tape of the learner yelling and protesting

would play as the shocks got more severe. Watch how the teacher (The Subject) reacts

In the first set of experimentsout of 40 people, 65% continued all the way to the

end, delivering a supposed 450 volts. In Milgram’s book on the experiment, Obedience to Authority,

he mentions how some of the Teachers said that the person receiving the shocks “was

so stupid and stubborn [that] he deserved to get shocked”. If they had just answered

the questions correctly, well, this never would have happened. Let’s look at the Goomba’s who

we are told “betrayed the Mushroom Kingdom”. Do they deserve to be punished, to be killed?

Well they’re untrustworthy, they’re not even human, and they’re stupid - they’ll

just walk off the ledge if you let them so maybe they deserve to be squashed. Something

is happening in our minds...two things actually we might not be entirely conscious

of them. Let’s use some BrainCraft to help explain...Confirmation Bias.

Confirmation Bias is where you interpret, remember or actively seek information that

confirms to your already existing beliefs. The more emotionally charged, the deeper the

belief. For example during the 2004 United States Presidential election neuroscientists

did a study where they placed people in an MRI machine to monitor their brain activity.

When the subjects who were pro President Bush heard information that was dissonant or didn’t

agree with what they already thought, the reasoning areas of their brain didn’t respond,

but when they were told information they agreed with, the emotional areas of the brain lit

up. The same thing occurred with the subjects who favored candidate John Kerry.

This is also a sign of cognitive dissonance, that feeling that you get when you recognize

that something isn't logically consistent, like knowing that you’ve acted in a way

that goes against your core values or principles. In fact if we watch the Milgram

Experiment video, you can actually see it happening in this subject.

And when faced with this dissonance we tend to convince ourselves that what we did was

right, like that the person being shocked deserved it, or that it was out of our control.

In ‘Mistakes Were Made But Not by Me’ Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson talk about

the power of irrevocability. “The more costly a decision...the more irrevocable its consequences,

the greater the dissonance and the greater the need to reduce it by overemphasizing the

good things about the choice made”. From cognitive dissonance we try to find cognitive

consistency. When it comes to crushing hundreds of Goombas or jumping on turtles

and kicking them into pits we need to justify those decision. They can’t just be innocent

creatures, right? "Well of course not they helped kidnap

the Princess so killing thousands of them is totally worth it to save the life of one

Princess.

Let’s look at it from a different angle, let’s argue that the Goombas don’t do any harm.

They walk back and forth minding their own business and are literally only a threat if

you walk directly into them. Did we ever take the time to learn

about them? To find out what they do, what they were like? No, because the game manual says that they

are bad. And we take that as fact

because it comes from a place of authority. And the dehumanizing of these characters is very

important. They are explicitly not people. They are monsters, creatures, animals. There

is US and then there is THEM.

Us and them is also known as Ingroups and Outgroups. Ingroup bias is the belief that

your group is better than any other group; called outgroups. Your ingroups are those

you identify yourself with, like your family, your college or a sports team. This bias can

even get personal.

In 1968, Iowa teacher Jane Elliott divided her third grade class on the basis of their

eye colour – blue or brown. She told the blue eyed children they were “the better

people in this room”. Almost immediately, the blue eyed children starting calling the

brown eyed children stupid and they wouldn’t sit with them in the playground. The blue

eyed children turned against the brown eyed ones simply because they were told they were

better.

As Professor James Waller states, the mere act of placing people into groups leads to

a bias. Then once in a group we can go a step further. We can start categorizing them with inhuman names like

monster, or animal, or demon. In Japanese, Bowser’s name literally translates to The Great

Demon King. He is the enemy. And it’s usually not an enemy or our enemy it's the enemy, the

definite article that makes it imputable, unchanging. Now obviously, in Super Mario Bros the bad guys aren't

physically human so it doesn't make sense to represent them as such

but we have to change the physical appearance of an individual or

a group to change how we feel about them, to change how we treat them. It could be something as

innocuous as going from calling them a student to calling them a Prisoner.

The Stanford Prison experiment is one of the most famous and controversial psychological

studies. Conducted in August 1971, 24 psychologically normal students were selected and placed in

a mock prison in the basement of a Stanford University building. 12 were randomly selected

as guards and the other 12 as prisoners. What was supposed to be a 2 week experiment had

to be stopped after only 6 days. The guards became increasingly sadistic.

Taking away their clothes, their mattresses, ridiculing and

mocking the other students

The difference between those 2 groups was their group designation: either prisoners

or guards. And it's crazy to think how quickly it devolved even when everyone

involved knew that it was an experiment. But it only took a few days for the people to

forget that.

He was just doing his job. During the experiment he doesn’t think his actions are evil, or

He was just doing his job. During the experiment he doesn’t think of himself as evil, or that his actions are evil. Just like Mario doesn’t think he is evil. He thinks what he is doing is

the right thing to do - he is saving the Mushroom Kingdom. But on the other hand King Koopa

probably thinks the same thing. He thinks that his actions are justified and that

Mario is actually the bad guy. Most people who we consider evil don’t think of themselves

as evil.

So again, we have to ask ourselves, Is Mario Evil? Or is he just a normal person put in

an abnormal situation? It’s easy to stand on the sidelines and form an opinion without

you yourself experiencing it. What would we do in Mario’s situation? Well

we already know. We are the ones controlling Mario. His actions are our own. Just like in

Milgram's experiment, we are the people delivering the shocks. And just like those people

we feel we have to continue, it's the only way. We have to continue because we

need to win, that’s what we've been told to do.

I recently replayed the first Super Mario Bros. and you can play the whole game without

killing or harming any characters, besides King Koopa. He is the only one that you have

to hurt to win. The rest of the game can be played by avoiding everyone else. So why do

we generally choose to kill them? Is it because we get more points, is it because the game manual,

the authority, tells us to? It might not seem like you have a choice, but just

like the people in Milgram’s experiment you can stop, or in the case of Super Mario Bros,

you can choose to play the game differently. If we admit that Mario is evil, are we also

saying that we are evil?

But in all of these judgements we make, there is this moral question of what is right and

wrong, what is good and evil. It’s a dilemma. Are you a hero, like the Mario we’re led

to believe in, or are your actions evil? There’s a thought experiment we can do that might

be able to help answer this. So, can you solve this dilemma?

Follow me over to BrainCraft to find out. And as always, thanks for watching.